Terror can’t kill cricket’s healing passion

Cricket has been known for many things: a kind of bucolic dream, shadows lengthening on the ground, the village blacksmith as fast bowler and, in this part of the world, as possessing a quality of Englishness.

It has also been associated with colonial chippiness, corruption, boycotts, snobbery and latterly with the frenzy of the Twenty20 game, which has turned on its head the old saying that cricket is baseball on Valium. But it has never before been drenched in blood.

Anybody who believed that cricket was protected by its own essential separation from the real world has been given a terrible shock. Cricket will never, ever, be the same after the attack on the Sri Lankan team in Lahore.

That is a tragedy because part of the appeal of cricket lies in the sense that it exists in a parallel and rather naive and sentimental universe; that is, of course, also part of its problem.

I have seen Indian slum children batting exuberantly on patches of open ground with bits of wood and bowling with balls made of salvaged rubber. I have seen Sri Lankans playing a game of club cricket on the edge of the Indian Ocean, on a ground fringed by palm trees and cooled by a breeze from the direction of Africa.

Nothing could have been more tranquil, more harmless, more reassuring, a metaphor for harmony.

The former president of Pakistan, Zia al-Huq, said that cricket is a glue and a bridge. He proposed to devote his life to peace through cricket but died in a plane crash. It seems he was wrong: because of its astonishing popularity on the subcontinent, cricket has become the means by which extremists can demolish bridges and unglue peoples.

There is something utterly inhuman and destructive in the attempts of Lashkar e-Taiba — if they are to blame — to destroy that which binds and creates common understanding.

Their aim is not just to put pressure on the governments of the region, because they must know that will not work, but to revel in a cult of holy terror. As a Pakistani spokesman said: "These people believe their actions have divine sanction."

They have struck at cricket because they can see that to hundreds of millions of Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Indians and Sri Lankans, be they Buddhists, Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, Christians or Jains, cricket is a life-affirming passion that transcends boundaries and ideologies.